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Christopher Breward
There are many interests beyond the working hours . . . a greenhouse filled with
chrysanthemums . . . a bicycle shed, a tennis lawn. The women, with their single domestic
servants . . . find time hangs rather heavy on their hands. But there are excursions to
shopping centres in the West End, and pious sociabilities. 6
Conformity and aspiration, it was claimed, informed a life that otherwise found
meaning through an adherence to the hollowness of commodity culture. Leisure
and gossip filled the void once occupied, supposedly, by the moral energies of
industrial production. The implications for the forging of suburban masculine
identities, given the weight that such negative rhetoric carried, were profound:
Listen to the conversation in the second class carriages of a suburban railway train, or
examine the literature and journalism specially constructed for the suburban mind; you
will often find endless chatter about the King, the Court, and the doings of a designated
“Society”; personal paragraphs, descriptions of clothes . . . a vision of life in which the
trivial and heroic things are alike exhibited, but in which there is no adequate test or
judgement . . . This is the explanation of the so called snobbery of the suburbs. Here is
curiosity, but curiosity about lesser occupation . . . so . . . a feud with a neighbour . . . a
bustling church . . . entertainment, or a criticism of manners and fashion . . . will be
thrown force and determination which might have been directed to effort of permanent
worth. 7
Added to this, opportunities for the comparison of appearances and attitudes were
legion in a culture that devoted greater energy and time to socially inclusive
activities. For all the criticism of the introverted nature of suburban living, the
practicalities of traveling to and from work every day and the intense engagement
with street life enforced by city-center occupations that annexed a more homogenous
experience of home and work, actually encouraged a tendency to observation,
speculation, and competition; a tendency allied by some early sociologists to the
degeneracy of crowd behavior and the feminizing pull of metropolitan social
activity. 8 The popular journal The Modern Man is littered with examples of the
attention paid by men to the appearance and behavior of others in such situations.
In an article titled “My Fellow Passengers,” William Thomson noted that:
The pawnbroker’s assistant . . . gets into my carriage every morning. His suit has
obviously been dry cleaned, and the cut does not quite seem to have been suggested by
the figure of the present wearer; but what he lacks in the matter of tailoring he makes up
for in jewellery. Sleeve links, watch chain, tie pin are all crudely visible, and his diamond
ring is the more noticeable because the finger which adorns it is not very clean, and is
actually in mourning at the tip . . . The callow youth is another unbearable. I have several
in mind, but one in particular . . . is appropriately addressed as “Baby” . . . Fairly well
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